Category: observations

Sometimes it’s better just to let the other guy talk: he may just say enough to make you look better than him. So John Gruber see Steve “Monkeyboy” Ballmer on the iPod and DRM media:

Daring Fireball: Some Joke:

Microsoft’s successful operating systems and office software monopolies came about largely because they’ve been successful selling them in the corporate market. But the corporate market is irrelevant when it comes to computer/entertainment convergence.

This isn’t about “I like Apple” and “I hate Microsoft” it’s simply an observation that successful consumer platforms are designed to make consumers happy, not clueless entertainment industry executives. The film industry fought against the VCR, but it became wildly successful anyway, because consumers loved it. (And it’s worth noting that Hollywood now makes more than 50 percent of its revenue from VHS and DVD sales — their opposition wasn’t just futile, it was foolish.) The TV industry largely despises TiVo — but people love it.

If Microsoft plans to build home entertainment systems that are designed to please entertainment industry executives, I don’t see how they expect their products to appeal to actual people.

Selling to corporations and institutions is easy, no doubt about it: one or a few decision-makers, some flexibility with discounts and arm-twisting of hardware vendors, and you’re done. But home users are different: it’s their money and their expectations. It’s their time that will be wasted with fiddly details that the vendors doesn’t care about. People buy a Windows PC because it’s what they’re used to at the office: increasingly, what they’re getting used to is frustration over unreliability and poor performance. They may not want to perpetuate that at home. As long as Ballmer and his flunkeys think of home users as some undifferentiated mass of office clerks, they’ll lose sales and so will their partners.

If we take the report on Iraq’s weapons capability at face value, what should we make of Saddam’s refusal to yield to a rigorous inspection regime? Why would he bluff at the risk of losing his power and position?

Take a look at the map: Iraq is the yellow bit in the middle, with Iran in pink to the right and Saudi Arabia to the left in brown. Would you want to admit to the world that you were defenseless, given a recent war with Iran and continued mutual antipathy toward Saudi Arabia?

Map of the Iran-Iraq War:

When two of the world’s leading suppliers of oil go to war, the world has to take sides, but when the war pits a corrupt dictatorship against a fanatic theocracy, it’s hard to know which side to take. As a purely practical matter, however, it’s best to line up with corrupt dictatorships because they’re usually more willing to work a deal. During the Iran-Iraq War, the world as a whole tossed in with Iraq. The two superpowers openly assisted the Iraqis, as did most centrist Moslem states such as Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Continue reading “dangerous bluff, continued”

The vice president, in his attempts to make Senator Edwards seem like a lightweight, not only claimed never to have seen him on the Senate floor but also claimed Edwards constituents felt he was shirking his duties. Facts are troublesome things.

The Pilot Newspaper – Opinion Page:

“His hometown newspaper has taken to calling him ‘Senator Gone,'” Vice President Richard Cheney said of his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Edwards.

Well, not exactly.

The Pilot hasn’t ‘taken to calling him’ anything. In fact, the vice president’s obscure reference sent us scrambling to our library. And sure enough, we did publish an editorial 15 months ago, on June 25, 2003, headlined, ‘Edwards Should Do His Day Job.’ In it, we noted that Sen. Jesse Helms used to be called ‘Senator No.’ And we added: ‘Four and a half years into his first term, John Edwards is becoming known as Senator Gone.’

The reference was to Edwards’ frequent absences from the Senate floor as he traveled here and there (mostly there) pursuing his presidential ambitions.

But we also wrote: “Members of the senator’s staff point out that Edwards’ attendance record this year has been better than the three other Democratic senators who are campaigning for president — Joe Lieberman, Richard Gephardt and Bob Graham. And the aides also say none of the votes Edwards missed was close, so his presence on the floor would not have changed the outcome.”

I was thinking of this last night when Cheney tossed the barb that neither Kerry nor Edwards were on the floor when some votes were taken: none of them were close votes, ie, there was real no point in being there, other than to be on the record. If the greater good is served by campaigning to turf the incumbents out of office, they did the right thing by campaigning.

[via]

And as it turns out, Cheney himself punched his card only 2 of 127 times. Hillary Clinton racked up more appearances in the chair than Cheney . . .

As often happens when one reboots a system infrequently, services that were started by hand don’t always come up automatically. In my case, my rendezvous/zeroconf configuration didn’t come back and I had to revisit how I had set up some months back. I found that the mDNSResponderPosix port does what I want by providing the notification and discovery layer for zeroconf-enabled clients and publishing client services with the addition of a config file: with that running, I can make daap work on FreeBSD and play with other services (Terminal.app will look for and connect to ssh, sftp, and telnet servers through zeroconf). The config file syntax is simple:
red:www
_http._tcp
path=/
80

Celestial Jukebox
_daap._tcp.
/opt/music
3689

red:ssh
_ssh._tcp.
none 22

red:ftp
_ftp._tcp
none
21

Rendezvous Browser tells the tale: The shell script below seems to work: improvements welcome.

Continue reading “zero-conf in Unix [cont’d]”

One more case of “never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity” or in this case a mix of stupidity and laziness: a college Republican club gave a fake endorsement to John Kerry on behalf of “Communists for Kerry.”

All Fox had to do was click on the “About” link:

“Communists for Kerry” is a campaign of the Hellgate Republican Club, a tax exempt non-partisan public advocacy “527” organization that exists for the purpose of;

“Informing voters with satire and irony, how political candidates make decisions based on the failed social economic principles of socialism that punish the individual by preventing them from becoming their dream through proven ideas of entrepreneurship and freedom.”

Our members help elect candidates who support economic growth through Entrepreneurship, limited government and lower taxes. Communists For Kerry is separate and distinct from the Communist party of America and any of its organization. None of it’s members are members of any communist organizations.

Another:

After the debate undecided voter Ted Lyons said Kerry sounded like “an idiot” in his response to several questions.

Then you look down into the article and see that Ted Lyons is a Republican political consultant. (Here he is hanging out with fellow members of the North Dade Republican Club.)

What I don’t see being mentioned anywhere in the discussion of weblogging and it’s impact is that very few people are getting paid to to publish a weblog: the reporters who seem to routinely miss the story, fail to check facts, or garble someone’s message are getting paid. They’re probably graduates of universities you may have heard of, and I suspect think of themselves as credible, responsible professionals.

I wish I knew why they seem to do such a lousy job.

How the other half lives: Moving up to the G5

I read through this and decided to see what XBench could tell me about my late 2003 iBook.

Results    68.57

Hmm, compared to the 212-220 clocked on a dual G5, that seems pretty slow.

Looking through the comparisons here, it seems RAM makes all the difference. It looks like 640 Mb is the sweet spot — the 256 I have is nowhere near enough.

Continue reading “sometimes it’s better not to know”

What is the injury-producing impact of a 500 lb smart bomb, in square feet? Imagine a circle with a four hundred foot radius. Use πr² and get 502,654.825. Google Calculator: pi * 400^2

If the room in which you sit is 20 * 20 (400 sq ft), the affected area would encompass 1,256 similarly-sized rooms. The likelihood of collateral damage seems high.

Now playing:I. Andante – Sym No.50 ‘Mount St. Helens’ Op.360 by Seattle Symphony from the album “Sym 50 ‘Mount St. Helens’/Symphony 22 ‘City Of Light'” | Buy it
I just made two CDs from this for some teachers . . . . Hovhaness was a local artist and used local themes and elements in his work. This one just seemed apropos, written as it was in the wake the 1980 eruption and on the cusp of another (70% chance, at last report).

Salon.com News | The rising

I think that this particular election is, at the core, a debate about the soul of the nation. I think we can move toward greater economic justice for all of our citizens, or we cannot. I think we can move toward a sane, responsible foreign policy, or we cannot. For me, these are issues that go right to the heart of the spiritual life of the nation.

A very thoughtful look at why he’s coming out with a stand on the war(s): the war in Iraq, the war on freedom of speech, the war on core American values.